results in a quietism that accepts
the fundamental base and order of the world’s condition as if it were
fact. It yields the mantra of a supposed ‘realism’, the mantra that says
‘Thereisnoalternative’ if you are Margaret Thatcher, or ‘Resistance
is futile’ if you are a Dalek. When democracy is corrupted in this way,
while still asserting a claim upon democracy, the political rhetorician
has recourse to ‘the will of the people’, as if that will is entirely unified,
without tension, internal difference, and nuance, and an expression of
freely expressed and independent

become normative. The sector leadership of the
University has not only accepted the mantra ‘Thereisnoalternative’,
but has worked instead to extend the logic of neoliberal economics
right into the heart of our intellectual life. It has embraced the very
monster that it should exist to expose and question. All must now be
monetized – and this includes not just our regular practices of teaching,
learning, research, and so-called impact, but also the monetization of
our very names and titles as institutions. We have our ‘brand’, our
‘reputation’, and – like the

only if it could be shown that thereisnoalternative to the use of
violence. Ultimately, the legal and moral arguments for the NATO war
against Yugoslavia come down to this TINA (there-is-no-alternative)
view. If I am right that the remaining unacceptable issue at the end
of the Rambouillet negotiations was Appendix B of the
agreement, the TINA claim is not only false; it is ridiculous. Also

off despair. District and Circle sees
Heaney beginning to suspect that thereisnoalternative but to interiorise and to cherish the past as the tangible world becomes ever more
insecure and loveless in outlook, no longer offering the comfort and
succour that it once promised. This shift in perspective triggers a new
urgency in Heaney’s interest in ‘Real Names’, and his new drive
towards estrangement is concerned with the paring apart of memories,
separating the real from the made-up in an attempt to restore the lines
of differentiation between the qualities that

) briefly considers this possibility only to reject it – since accepting it might imply that
the old social democracy is not so redundant after all – by ultimately appealing to a deus ex machina that supposedly reinforces the superiority of
Third Way politics: the advent of globalisation and information society as
that which allegedly renders all other strategies obsolete (Giddens and
Hutton, 2000: 45–51). As noted in the introduction, the NSD therefore
appeals to a TINA logic (‘ThereIsNoAlternative’) which represents the
intolerant closure of the social imagination

's left of Roman political forms is mere theatrics devoid of substance; and yet, since thereisnoalternative to this theatrics, no going outside of it, and since it is presided over by so consummate an actor, who never lets fall his mask of abiding by Roman political decorum, a kind of substance is strangely reified. It seems both that what constitutes the Roman state has been irretrievably gone for a long time, and that what constitutes it can be nothing other than the Rome we see. With his measures to placate the censorious eyes of his own government, Jonson

modified approach to trade liberalisation, with greater emphasis on poverty reduction. Speaking to the World Bank
development Committee in April 2000, Commissioner Nielson said that the
objective was ‘globalisation with a human face’. He went on to say that ‘while
thereisnoalternative to an open and liberal world economy, this is not an end
in itself. Political action is required to harness not only the potential and oppor50
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The unimportance of trade preferences
tunities offered by the global economy, but also to limit the transition

her to call back (from 18)
You know Ann will be back tomorrow so you ask the woman to call back. You
need to make a brief entry in the case-file documenting the woman’s call in case
it turns out to be of importance to her case. As you end the entry and close the
window on your computer screen the phone rings again. The next caller is a man.
He has been fired from his job during a period of illness and since he therefore
cannot return to work part-time thereisnoalternative to referring him to “activity.” You have asked him to read through material from three

-regulating laws of the market’ and the ‘value-neutral’ ‘science’ of
economics; the ‘fact’ that ‘thereisnoalternative’ to a society organized on the
neoliberal market principle that ‘greed is good’ is the beast’s countenance in
the current post-national, post-political, seemingly leaderless era.
2
INTRODUCTION
Spiritus mundi of global neoliberalism
The rough beast is represented by one of the world’s oldest and fully elaborated demonologies, the Assyrian demon of the desert storm, Pazuzu. Pazuzu
– a canine, insect, serpent, raptor, humanoid – animal hybrid, is the dog

possessed by wild, raging passions that (like Pazuzu’s
possession of Regan) lurches forwards and backwards and careens from side to
side, turning itself inside out, wrenching its head from front to back, fluxing,
morphing and wildly alternating between grotesque and bizarre forms of
plutocracy, democracy and tyranny; authoritarian populist anarcho-capitalism. As it was for Plato’s Athens, this is the present sorry state of the Irish
republic.
Is there no alternative? Contrary to the neoliberal doctrine that ‘thereisnoalternative’, Plato says that there certainly is an